Subject: Re: [draft-nottingham-http-link-header-06] concerns about Link header

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 17:07:27 +1000

Hi Anne,

I'm going to assume when you say "we", you are speaking from a Web  
browser POV; either specifically as Opera, or generally from a HTML5  
viewpoint. Please correct me if that isn't so.

As many others have pointed out, there are a large number of non- 
browser uses for Link. There are also some use cases involving  
browsers, of course.

However, if HTML5 -- and by extension, browser vendors -- don't think  
it important enough to support, by all means don't support it; I had  
somewhat resigned myself to this earlier. When doing so, though,  
please don't assume that because you don't find it useful, no one else  
will.

I'll go back to my bitching, so I can get this gimmick to RFC status  
now...

On 31/08/2009, at 8:26 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> I should probably have expressed my doubts earlier, but I don't  
> really have the feeling that implementing the Link header fully per  
> specification is really worth all the effort. In fact, dropping the  
> limited support we have seems like a more attractive option.
>
> Having a UI for the <link> element never really took of in the  
> decade that it existed except for a few special values (which people  
> are bitching about on this list; "alternate stylesheet" is one of  
> the few minor success stories) and hoping that interest in  
> implementing such a thing will revive if we re-introduce the Link  
> header seems misguided. Making the Link header more complex than its  
> counterparts by supporting localized titles also feels way too much  
> like some nice theoretical idea that might be implemented correctly  
> in a few clients but will hardly be used in practice. (It also stops  
> it from being semantically equivalent to the HTML <link> element,  
> but that is not stated. A bug?)
>
> And while obviously lots of thought went into the specification, the  
> primary goal seems to be to getting it to RFC status rather than  
> getting it implemented in clients. There are no test cases, almost  
> no checking of existing applications, almost no requirements for  
> clients in the draft.
>
> This is also not a feature Web authors are asking for as far as I  
> know. (The implementation of the Link header in Opera was more done  
> as a gimmick and in retrospect we should probably not have done it.)
>
>
> -- 
> Anne van Kesteren
> http://annevankesteren.nl/
>

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

---

From: "Anne van Kesteren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:26:53 +0200

> viewpoint. Please correct me if that isn't so.

Just Opera.

> As many others have pointed out, there are a large number of non-browser  
> uses for Link. There are also some use cases involving browsers, of  
> course.

Sure.

> However, if HTML5 -- and by extension, browser vendors -- don't think it  
> important enough to support, by all means don't support it; I had  
> somewhat resigned myself to this earlier. When doing so, though, please  
> don't assume that because you don't find it useful, no one else will.

Sure.

It would still be nice though if you addressed my points, e.g. as to why  
the Link header needs to support more complex scenarios than atom:link or  
html:link.